Follow-up note on Thursday’s “Blog Action Day 09,” CNN.com reported, “The scale of involvement in the day has been impressive. So far, over 8,000 blogs have registered in 144 countries and organizers predict that there will be around 15 million readers.” BAD ’09 organizer, Robin Beck, stated in a follow-up email, “We hit 31,000 total trackable blog posts, and our current estimate is that together we reached at least 17.9 million people yesterday. We just exceeded 13,000 registered bloggers on the site and are working to get all of you who posted but haven’t yet registered into the final count.”

CNN.com

Beck continued, “We had at least three major world governments as active participants in this year’s event. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown posted the first Blog Action Day entry in Britain at the stroke of midnight on the 15th, which was followed by Foreign Minister David Milliband and many others from the UK stationed around the world. The PSOE governing party of Spain hosted a bloggers event focused on climate change and transformed their website for the day to promote Blog Action Day. And late in the day, President Barack Obama’s White House blog joined in become part of the global movement of bloggers shaking the web.” So, in all Beck felt like it was a great success in that it sparked conversations about climate change.

Sources:

Image & article “Bloggers unite on climate change” By Matthew Knight/CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/14/blog.action.day.climate/ retrieved on 10/16/2009

        

I recently heard that a government representative in DC wanted to call together the whole scientific community in order to determine once and for all whether human activity had any bearing on climate change. That the man feels the need to do this would indicate that he feels that there is some question as to whether what we are doing to the planet is having any lasting effect. I guess a shrinking polar ice cap and general glacial retreat can be attributed to the approach of 2012 or something like that.

So, let’s be entirely clear about what might contribute to this person’s state of doubt. We in the “Developed West” believe that the most important entity is the individual and we darn near worship the independent individual. Government, community, family, culture, they have some importance, but the most important thing in all of the universe is the individual. I before thee or we. Period. Somewhere in there is a twisted interpretation of the commission in the book of Genesis that man should go forth and conquer the world and do with it what he pleases. Man, individual, conquer, seems pretty clear.

Of course, up until this last century very very few individuals could even hope to survive a single year without the intervention or assistance of others. Forget that part. What we have here is the result of decades of individual-worship and the inability to recognize that we are, in fact, inter-connected and that everything we do has some ripple-effect across the world. The fact that we don’t “see” this, like watching dominoes knocking one another over on a table, only reveals the gross limitations to our powers of perception. Add to this that our lifespans are so pathetically short, too short for an individual to experience the changes wrought by ones actions. So, because we don’t see the changes very easily we assume that we can do whatever we please with no concern for the results of our behaviors. To me this shows how little we understand of this world we would presume to conquer. The scariest part is that those who have the need to lead and grasp at the reins of power may be most susceptible to the delusion that they as individual leaders are more important than those they represent or lead, and take no responsibility for their actions. So whether you are a five-year-old secretly coloring on the walls in your bedroom or a governor of a bankrupt state, or the former president of a religious denomination, every choice, no matter how small will effect us all on some level. We are all connected.

“Wherefore whatsoever ye have said in the darkness shall be heard in the light; and what ye have spoken in the ear in the inner chambers shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.” Luke 12: 3 (ASV)

How about we do something good with all of this power.

Sources:

image: “the heat is on” by jenny downing, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenny-pics/3800586843/ retrieved on 10/14/2009.